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Comment by jp0d | Hacker News Reader

A lot of comments have praised SICP on this thread. I'm a data analyst but I don't have a computer science background. I somehow prefer the ML family languages to Lispy parentheses. Could anyone please suggest an SICP equivalent book in Standard ML, Scala, F# etc? Thank you.

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I learned a lot (particularly the beauty of recursive functions) reading the first half of ML for the Working Programmer. The second edition is online.[1] I did not like it as much as the first edition TBH.

The other ML book that would be in the spirit of SICP is Programming in Standard ML.[2] I did not read the whole thing, but the parts I read influenced my programming style.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/

[2] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf

Thanks mate, I'll have a look.

Don't know how equivalent is this to SICP, but this is very good resource: https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Thanks mate. I was honestly hoping for some F# resources as I'd started learning it a bit. But would mind glancing over this. Cheers.

If you are not happy with Lisp parenthesis, why don't you try Elm or Elixir?

I thought Elm was very much about web development. And Elixir is too in some ways. Both Scala and F# have a lot going on in the data space. Scala more so than F#. Standard ML is exciting because it's not big. And probably a better choice for understanding the fundamentals but Scala or F3 for something serious? This is just my best guess. Actually that reminds me of a very nice course in Standard ML from the University of Washington on Coursera, but it's not a book.

Are you talking about the Programming Languages course on Coursera? I intend to do it someday. The first few videos seemed very nice, indeed.

Phoenix is about webdev, but Nerve is not. There was a recent thread on HN on using Elixir for Machine Learning. Maybe look into that? Elixir is just very pretty in my eyes.

Scala is dominant in big data for almost a decade now. Haven't heard that about F#.

Yes, the programming languages course on Coursera! Yes, you're right, Scala is a lot more prevalent mostly because of Spark. I work on Spark occasionally but mostly use pySpark. But I'm fascinated by the world of functional programming. I think I tried setting up Elixir on my Mac a couple of years ago and it didn't work for some reasons and I almost forgot about it after that. I'm a bit interested in F# as a lot of finance companies use it. It's not that popular. I learned a bit from a Udemy course and I really liked the language even thought I'm not a fan of Microsoft. And it works perfectly on Macs! :)

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